Conventional router fabric designs use proprietary switch application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) devices to provide their required characteristics. As these devices are typically designed for a closed environment, there has not been any standardization for such chip designs, and therefore they can be very expensive. These chips can also have some limited scalability. Building routers spanning more than a single chassis with these conventional ASICs has proven to be difficult and expensive.
Today's router fabric uses these specialized chips to provide characteristics such as guaranteed packet delivery across the fabric, low delay, consistent jitter, maximized bandwidth capacity, etc.
The rise of Data Center (DC) networks and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) require high quality, security, reliability and stability, especially as it concerns network convergence in case of congestion. Fiber Channel (FC) becomes the de facto storage protocol standard for implementing Storage Area Networks (SANs) in data centers. Yet the extension of storage protocol standard Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) over network (Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI)) is in use. These technologies are very sensitive to frame loss. Several other applications have recently arisen that are very sensitive to network latency for example, high-frequency trading, high-performance computing, and RAM-Cloud.
When moving routers into the cloud/DC environment, one is faced with the challenge that the traditional monolithic, single chassis routers are not as suitable in a DC environment. Conventional router functions, such as the route processing and service cards can be mapped to a virtual network function (VNF) running in server blade(s). To retain the same capabilities as a monolithic router provided to those applications, the capabilities that the router fabric provided also need to be provided in the DC environment.
Due to the widespread use of Ethernet, it has become the primary network protocol that is considered to support both DC networking and SDN. Ethernet was originally designed as a best-effort communication protocol and it does not support frame delivery guarantee.
While it may be possible to bring specialized chips into a DC environment, the higher cost and their co-habitation with Ethernet pose potential problems. Using Ethernet can lower the cost and seamlessly integrate with the rest of the DC fabric. It would be desirable to provide the characteristics of a conventional router fabric using standard Ethernet technology.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method that obviate or mitigate the above described problems.